There must be a considerable distance travelled, however, in the evolution of the cognitive faculty in the process of hominisation, since it has resulted in much more complex expressions of meaning than these, including the possibility that there can be a meaningful expression freed from the identification of a unique individual or stimulus in the immediate environment, so that “human language allows the description of a distant process (in space and time) and frees the mind from the tyranny of the “here and now‘ to which the animal remains subject”

Any representation must have an iconic aspect, and in this case we would say that any of these memories of a text, or derived from a text, are iconic insofar as they are directly motivated by the form of the text itself. But just as with any iconic representation they can be deformed to a point where they no longer bear an isomorphic relation to the original, for example in memory impairment.